SOCIALIZE WITH US

A Plane Full of Single Ladies is Coming to SFO

Move over Y-Combinator, here
comes an XX-XY Combinator. A startup app called the Dating Ring wants to
correct a major disturbance in the Force: the burgeoning gender imbalance
between the East and West Coasts. Simply put, San Francisco just doesn’t have
enough single ladies and New York has a surplus of them, so the Dating Ring is planning to fly women in from New York to restore
harmony to this gender disequilibrium in a way eHarmony can’t.

The Census does bear out
the anecdotal belief that New York is full of single women, although its stats
are only broken down by metro area. Nationwide, there are more adult women than
men, but San Francisco proper is only 49.1 percent female, and therefore relatively full of dudebros: the Bay Area has 93
unmarried men for every 100 unmarried women, NYC only 79. Factor out the
prevalence of widows over widowers because of women’s longer life expectancy
and the picture is even starker.

However, neither this
voluntary human trafficking nor the Dating Ring itself are open to just anyone.
You have to sign up and pay $25 to enter the Dating Ring’s “beta pool” – which
is presumably weeding out at least some people who then fall ever further
behind in the quest to find a mate. The slightest whiff of un-date-ability and
you might be banished to romantic limbo. For instance, in San Francisco, women
over 35 and men over 40 need not
apply.

The accompanying Crowdtilt
campaign, aiming to raise $50,000, enlists women who claim they’d fly across
the country for love because “all men in New York are gay or awful.” (Here I
must interject that picking San Francisco as the solution to the first part of
that problem might not be a form of, how do you engineers say, optimization?)
Each $20 a woman contributes earns her a chance at being chosen, and $500
outright guarantees you a seat on the plane; the top level of $1,250 gets you
housing accommodations (but hopefully not here), a
couple parties over Memorial Day weekend, date-coaching sessions over Skype, and
three Dating Ring dates.

Gimmicky, yes, but hardly a
ripoff, and arguably necessary because the Dating Ring’s underlying premise is
accurate. Even if this feels like an elaborate monetization of loneliness, it’s
still a mathematical impossibility for all of San Francisco’s heterosexual
males to find someone to grow old together with. (The stakes are even higher in
countries like India and China, where sex-selective abortions have created societies with way more men than women).

Still, a plane full of single
women flying in to party and score does sound like a ton of fun. If the
Crowdtilt succeeds, maybe someone will make a documentary out of the endeavor. And
it’s always possible that two people who might never have met otherwise will
fall madly in love. Even if the chances are a lot smaller than the odds of a
lot of shit-talking on Lulu.